Windows 98, Where it all started for me

With all the stuff in our modern operating systems its easy to take the small things for granted. Booting your Windows 7 install off your USB Key, watching videos on youtube, RSS’ing up your Favourite news / comic feeds, listening to your favourite music over Spotify or finishing your Engineering Diagrams for college on your tablet PC. It was certain key Operating systems from Microsoft that allowed you to get to this point.

Where do you want to go today ?

Windows 98

I started out on Windows 95 about 12 years ago, its hard to believe it when i look back; 95 seemed so revolutionary at the time. 16k Modem + Internet Explorer and an allowance of 30 minutes a week way back when, i used to get in trouble for tie-ing up the phone line for “That dam internet” as my dad used to say. I remember having to setup a Canon Bublejet 460c, that was a task and a half which normally ended up with the PC blue screening when printing photos. The computer didn’t really get much use in our house with 95 on it.

Flash forward 2 years and queue the acquisition of Windows 98 from compustore, A Side Winder Joystick and Flight Sim 98 + Monster Truck Madness!

Installing 98 was so much easier than when i had to install Windows 95, i got a copy of Windows 98 that had a bootable CD !!!! Bootable back then was like a god send, no sitting there looking for the Windows Start-up Disk that’s sitting in a drawer somewhere, no calling to a friend to see if he had his either!

I remember the first boot and then remembering the printer, i wasn’t looking forward to installing it, but…. to my surprise…. it was already there…. installed…… automatically, that’s because Windows 98 SE had better PNP support for many devices which was a welcome improvement over 95. These were the first signs of what was to happen with PC’s.

The The Task bar & Start Menu have evolved

Windows Media Player has Matured

Windows is now smart enough to install even complex hardware devices, no more Coffee and head scratching Moments

Up until about 2003ish i was still looking at peoples installs of Windows 98, back then it hadn’t really aged that much. Its only when @MSSpringboard said to me about Windows 98 did all my memories of Flight Sim, Monster truck madness come flooding back. Instead of being a piece of equipment that was sat in the corner collecting dust and occasionally put some expense on the phone bill Windows 98 helped the PC in our home become more, printing off Information from Encarta to a printer that 2 years previous crashed the OS under stress.

It was Early 2000 when we purchased 2 Windows 98 PC’s for my dads business, changing hand written estimates into fully softcopy reprint able and retraceable estimates that could be emailed or faxed over our ISDN lines.. It gave us capabilities that we had not had before, people did not have to wait for Estimates to be dropped to doors or have to come collect them.

Today we still have this capability and more, we adopted Sharepoint to workflow estimates and email them to customers.